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Saw Detroit. Man, that is one harrowing movie.
It’s a narrative I’m very familiar with: I read John Hershey’s The Algiers Motel in 1968 when it was first published. I was 16, and the book had a profound effect on me. It’s a literal reenactment of the infamous Milgram experiment.
There’s no behavior so depraved that a human being won’t do it if the responsibility for that behavior can be shunted up some chain of command. The three people who read this journal may be thinking, No, no, I wouldn’t!
Except yes: You would.
And so would I.
And that right there is the root of all evil.
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I’m not at all sure I understood the extent of the racial divide in this country when I was 16. New York City in those days was integrated in theory but segregated in practice. For example: PS 87, the elementary school I attended – right around the corner from the Museum of Natural History! – had lots of black students, but there wasn’t a single black kid in my class. There weren’t any black kids at Hunter College High School either, which you could only attend if you scored above 90% on its incredibly arduous entrance exam.
My mother’s family – educated Jews - called black people schwartzes.
My father’s family – uneducated Sicilians - called black people niggers.
I can’t remember what I called them. But I knew that when you met a black person, the doctrine of equality meant you had to pretend there were no differences. I still remember with great gratitude the black nurse who took me aside my very first day on the wards and said, “Our skin gets ashy. Ya gotta use lotion. You don’t brush our hair like you brush your hair. They didn’t teach you any of this stuff in nursing school? Well, no. They wouldn’t.”
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The 1967 Detroit riots were probably the deadliest and most destructive in American history. That same year, there were riots in Newark and in Plainfield, New Jersey, in Milwaukee and in Minneapolis. The next year, Martin Luther King was shot, and the riots spread to more than 100 other cities – including Berkeley, where your faithful narrator was a member of the People’s Park mob that got tear-gassed and shot at by Alameda County sheriffs.
(Come to think of it, I was a veritable 60s Zelig of sorts, having been present at (1) the screaming hoards of teenyboppers welcoming the Beatles to the Plaza Hotel in 1962; (2) the 1969 People’s Park riots; and (3) Altamont.)
There’s never been a definitive account of the events that took place at the Algiers Motel on the night of July 25 in which three young men ended up dead. Ballistics analyses linked their deaths to firearms commonly used by the Detroit police. Three cops were subsequently charged with homicide, but Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t use their real names since they all got off. She couldn’t use any of the material in Hersey’s book either since the rights could not be secured.
For the record, the cops’ real names are Robert Paille, Ronald August, and David Senak.
Bigelow’s film draws heavily from the memories of the surviving victims and includes a lot of speculation, particularly about the death of Fred Temple who was the last of the three men to be slaughtered. In that sense, Detroit has to be viewed as fiction.
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Bigelow has always been an interesting filmmaker from my point of view because she defies gender expectations. She makes unsentimental movies about the effects of violence – a traditionally male expertise. (Interestingly, she was once married to James Cameron who makes bloated, sentimental movies about sinking ships and climate change.) She’s a very attractive woman, too, which should be irrelevant to any conversation about talent, but (let’s get real) isn’t.
The critics who liked it liked it a lot.
The critics who didn’t like it didn’t like it becaw-w-w-w-se:
(1) It was excessively violent. How could a director tell an actor to administer these brutal blows, not just once but repeatedly? decried a squeamish New Yorker reviewer.
(2) It was an example of cultural appropriation! Movies about black people should only be made by black people! (Ya gotta believe this line of reasoning was an underground whisper campaign paid for by Spike Lee.)
(3) It didn’t show the rich cultural life of people in Detroit! Well, no. Because then it would have been a bloated, sentimental movie and her X-Husband could have made it.
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I was the only person in the audience for Detroit – a 6:30pm showing on a Friday night, and this doesn’t auger well for Detroit’s chances of earning back its initial investment. Even black people are staying away from this one, and I can see why: When you’ve moved well beyond dire events in the history of your people, you might appreciate if not exactly enjoy a movie about those events. My mother’s family members were all big fans of Schindler’s List.
But as the failure to convict Philando Castile’s murderer indicates, the United States has not moved beyond the events portrayed in Detroit. Young black men continue to be humiliated and slaughtered by white cops and watching that transpire on a screen without the slightest promise of redress is just too, too painful.
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In other news, I spoke at some length with Celeste, and the story of Tailisen is even kinkier and weirder than that I’d initially thought.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s third wife Oglavanna is Gloria Swanson straight outa Sunset Boulevard. A Gurdjieff groupie! Taliesen West was just this festering brew of weird sex and egos!
And then there was that whole subplot with Stalin’s daughter!
This will make a fine bestseller! And it’s a memoir! So, you know – someone’s opinion!
The best thing would be if I could stumble across any supporting evidence to prove that Frank Lloyd Wright spent the last years of his life as a bumbling old idiot, being dressed up in white suits and wheeled out on special occasions (his keepers, all the while, hoping that he didn’t pee on himself ‘cause, you know: Depends hadn’t yet been invented, and pee stains white suits.) And that his apprentices designed all the buildings! Including the fuckin’ Guggenheim!
But I suspect that might be a little too much to hope for.
Sigh…
Anyhoo, I must read The Fellowship : The untold story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship, which apparently is the definitive smear book about Tailisen as well as T.C. Boyle’s The Women, which apparently is a novel about Oglavanna.
